Blueberry Pancakes: The Novel

by Anton Lee Richards

  The funeral director announced that they would now move his ashes to his final resting place. Rachel left Caleb with a relative and walked over to us.

  “How are you holding up?” Rachel asked me.

  “Me? What about you?”

  “The best I can in these circumstances,” she said with a laugh. “Silas always made things difficult for me.”

  Robin grabbed Marlene’s hand. “We’re so, so sorry,” he said.

  Marlene couldn’t speak. She kept sniffling.

  “Guess I won’t be seeing you around the old condo anymore,” she said, “not that I ever went downstairs into that studio.” She scouted the room for a few remaining guests and then focused back on us. “I know you lost a lot too.”

  “We did, but we’re worried about you,” Marlene said.

  “All those computers, machines, and gadgets, they have to go. The mikes and everything. I want to expel him from my life. I have no need for anything musical. It’s all yours, Duncan. The Factory can record another hit in his honor.”

  Somehow in her ultimate moment of grief, she was the one doing the comforting. Losing a good friend wasn’t my only concern. My career and future were on his computer. All the songs we were working on and the backup files of previous songs. If someone wanted an alternate version of a song, for instance, we would need access to the original files. I was uncomfortable to want the equipment though I really did. His death should have been the number one thing on my mind rather than the equipment. What the fuck was wrong with me worrying about this while still at his funeral?

  But it wasn’t just his equipment. His expertise was incalculable. I could take a class in Pro Tools, but I’d never come close to being able to do what he did. And then there was the business side of things. He was the only one of us who knew what he was doing. Now Marlene had to find a real manager to help her career, which would leave me in her wake. What bothered me the most was that The Factory fell apart in such a gruesome fashion, right before Marlene was about to have real success. Silas would never enjoy the fruits of his labor. It wasn’t fair.

  Marlene went with me the day I picked up Silas’s equipment. We rented a small storage unit for the vocal booth, mikes, keyboards, and speakers, but we took his computer to our apartment. We had no pressing need for any files now, but I wanted to familiarize myself with his system.

  When I booted up his computer, and it asked for the password, I remembered that he made a distinct point of telling me before his death. I tried to clear my head of thoughts that he premeditated his suicide long before it happened. The password worked, and I searched through files for songs. Inside that folder were more folders for each song, by title. Then there was the Promo folder. I thanked Jesus-Allah-Buddha that Silas had made this easy on me. I searched through the business files and found another folder labeled Marlene Pictures. It had over twelve hundred files. I viewed them as thumbnails and wondered where they came from. Some were pictures of her in his studio, and some were of her in the vocal booth. I did not know he had cameras in the studio. Excellent promo material though.

  In the living room, I flipped through the laptop while Marlene flipped through Netflix. When I nodded for her to come towards the computer, she was not happy to get up.

  “I never agreed to be filmed while recording vocals,” she said. “I mean, I should have, because you always see pictures of artists recording.” She leaned on my chair to get a better look at the laptop screen. “They’re great photos. It doesn’t look promotional at all. I didn’t dress up for recording. Maybe he wanted me to dress down so that it looked more authentic and Instagrammable.”

  “Your version of dressing down is my version of dressed up.” I continued to search and found a folder named Videos. All the file names were dates and clubs. “A light bulb just went off in my head.”

  She mock smacked my head. “What light bulb? What are you getting at?”

  “This file is a video from the Flagship Rebellion on January 13th, the one that had gone wild on YouTube. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if we opened it.”

  “Yeah, we’ve all seen it,” she said, growing testy with each file I opened. “He probably saved it off YouTube after that weirdo posted it and wanted to use it for promo since it was such great quality. It’s only the one song, ‘Touch My Soul.’”

  “That song is about four minutes long,” I said. “This video is 25 minutes long. Let’s see.”

  She slumped down on the couch next to me as I pressed fast forward. The rest of that night’s concert unfolded as we watched her prance around onstage and the camera focused solely on her. Marlene’s eyes went buggy as she watched the screen. “So he’s the culprit behind the videos, but why would he keep it from us.” She thought for a minute. “He probably didn’t trust us with a secret, and wanted to keep it a genuine mystery, therefore creating an actual buzz.”

  “Nope. I think he was obsessed with getting the right angle for the right picture to get into the right hands to make you famous. Or maybe he liked you and wanted a distraction from his marriage. He has all these pics and videos of you that aren’t promotional material.” Who was I to speculate on what Silas might have felt?

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She screamed and then froze in place. “Oh my God, this is my fault. My fault!” Her hands covered her mouth. “He killed himself because my career hasn’t skyrocketed like he expected.”

  “Stop. Just stop. This is not your fault. Rachel’s at home right now thinking of all the things she did wrong too. So am I. Maybe if I wrote better songs, he would’ve wanted to live to promote them, and so on. It doesn’t help.”

  She calmed down, and we sat in silence for a couple of minutes. I leaned into her and patted her head. A couple of minutes were all I could handle, so I turned my attention back to the laptop.

  “Hey, look,” I said, as I opened a folder labeled Rachel. “I’m not sure if I want to open this or not,” I said.

  “I’m not sure if you should either,” Marlene said. We looked back and forth at each other for a minute. “Okay, do it.”

  There were three Word documents with three separate dates on them.

  The Stuck

  You already know that I blame you for Caleb. You had him only to piss me off, yet you hate Caleb more than I do. In our mutual hatred, we created another life that is just an expression of that hatred. He will be one fucked up kid. In one way or another, I won’t be around to watch him grow up so you can do the best job you know how of fucking him up just how you fucked me up. You knew that music was my only purpose, and you fucked that up too. You were jealous that I had something outside you while you had nothing without me. You have no depth to your being, and that’s why you resent me. If only I were man enough to ditch you.

  “That was from six months ago,” I said. I opened the second file.

  Try a Little Harder

  You kept me because your father hated the idea of you dating someone in a band and I kept you because I needed someone to keep me grounded. We are no longer pretending that we like each other. Instead of making each other miserable, let’s try to get along for Caleb’s sake and the sake of our sanity. We’ve gotten along in the past. Hell, at one point we even loved each other. If we both act civil, eventually we’ll love each other again.

  That letter was the first time I’d ever seen him refer to Caleb in a favorable light. I knew he had it in him even if he was bitching about the kid left and right. He labeled the third file The Bullet. It must have been his plan. Just the idea of opening the file made me tremble.

  “No, don’t open it,” Marlene said. “I mean, if you want to some other day, fine, but not now.” She got up and left the apartment saying nothing, the door slamming behind her.

  I opened another folder and searched through the thumbnails. They were more pictures of Marlene, but this time, in our own apartment. How could he have gotten those? I searched the living room and found two tiny cameras based on the angles—one above the piano and one above the couc
h. What a creep! I removed them and sat back down to look at more pictures. I found a few of Marlene in the bathroom. Since she was usually in the bathroom for hours at a time, I was sure he could have gotten many pictures. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and removed that camera as well. She’d had enough for one day, so I held off on telling her about that one. Marlene came home three hours later, and I never asked her where she went, but she was in a much better mood.

  She opened the door and stood in the two-foot tiled foyer. “Pancakes.” She waved her hand for me to come.

  “Of course,” I said. “Should we call Robin?” I put on my shoes.

  “I already texted him. The remainder of The Factory should mourn and-slash-or freak out together. Robin’s gonna be mad that Silas was so perverted. We shouldn’t tell him, okay?”

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut and full of pancakes.” If she only knew the extent of Silas’s obsession.

  We walked to Pancake Heaven through a light mist. Char greeted us with a grimace, and we knew she knew about Silas. Marlene whispered in her ear as we walked to our table and a few minutes later two plates full of buckwheat pancakes arrived—Silas’s favorite. Char patted me on the back before walking toward another table. Robin showed up while we were eating and sat down without saying a word. I thanked Jesus-Allah-Buddha that the restaurant was crowded and that the noise from other patrons saved us from an eerie silence.

  “Come on, girls. Cheer up,” Char said once we finished. “Do you remember the first time you brought Silas here? He thought you were all crazy cakes. Eventually, he caught on and fell in love with all of you and even the pancakes too.”

  “Then why did he–” Marlene started.

  “Stop it,” said Robin, putting his hand on her thigh. “We’ll never know. It’s complex, and he probably didn’t even know why himself. It’s not healthy to keep asking.”

  “I wish I could have stopped it,” Marlene said. Char put her hand on Marlene’s shoulder.

  “We all do,” I said.

  “Do you think we can stop by his grave this afternoon, before sunset?” Marlene asked.

  “You guys go ahead without me,” I said. “I have an idea for a song.”

  Part Ten

  Gluten-free Pancakes

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  BOHEMIAN GOLD

  “What is your art?”

  That was the last thing Silas said before he left our apartment for the last time. I thought nothing of it then because he had been saying off-the-cuff things to us for a while. Afterward, that sentence stood out in my mind.

  I didn’t know he was speaking about himself. I thought he wanted me to ask myself that question as if my happiness—my art—was what mattered. Not his. Silas and I had a lot in common, creatively and in our IT careers. He didn’t understand why the question didn’t torture me the way it did him. If Marlene hit it big, he saw me as writing more winners and making a living without The Factory. He thought he’d work his day job forever and thought his contributions were replaceable. That was the difference between us. He would have stuck, with his career and his wife and child, while I’d go on to enjoy creative freedom. It occurred to me that this might have been going through his mind in those last moments before he ended it all. Marlene and I tried to assure him it wasn’t true. Each of us in The Factory had the capacity to have successful careers after we separated. Silas didn’t see it that way. By the end, music became a means for Silas to escape his life through its success, rather than something to enjoy or express.

  He didn’t see that our art existed merely because we willed it to be. We didn’t have to have success with The Big Apple Tarts or our hits with Marlene. Our joy came from doing our work; not succeeding at it. My joy came from recording with Silas, and I didn’t know if I would have as much fun doing it with anybody else.

  That night I went home and wrote a song called “Bohemian Gold.”

  Freedom to find my hidden treasure

  Clad fully in solid gold

  Filled with its own riches

  More than I had ever told

  Release my chains in this rat race

  To finally break the mold

  Forever mine to hold

  I’m dreaming of bohemian gold

  It was my first post-Silas song, inspired by his words, words I wish he had used to pen it himself.

  Two days after I played “Bohemian Gold” for Marlene, she and I sat in our usual booth at Pancake Heaven discussing it. It had been a week since Silas’s funeral, but it seemed like weeks had passed.

  “It’d bring something different to the album,” I said. “Everything else is silly love songs.”

  “Silly love songs you wrote.”

  “We should record you singing it and then upload it online. Let’s see how it does. I’ve hacked into Silas’s secret YouTube account. People will still think it’s the same guy.” Sadly, most of the followers of this account would never know who Silas was, or that he died.

  She turned her head away and mumbled something. Then she looked back. “How did you hack it? Did you know the password?”

  Marlene had been to purgatory and back over the past week. I didn’t have the nerve to confess that Silas gave me the password weeks ago, possibly planning his own death well in advance. “I guessed the password would have the word stuck in it, and when I found a file named ‘StuckWithYou123,’ I that was it. Great minds think alike.” I killed the smile on my face for feeling so clever.

  She scrutinized my face, the way she invariably did when she knew I was lying to her. “Did you used to feel like that?” Marlene asked.

  “Stuck? Yeah,” I said. “That job stole my soul.”

  “I don’t get it. Just do what you want to do. It’s that simple.”

  “If you’re an ubertalented, sexy singer, then you have options. If you’re not, then it’s not that simple, and you may be stuck doing a job you hate. That’s what he meant when he said he had stuck. That’s why he....” I shut myself up.

  “You said yourself that we shouldn’t speculate like that anymore,” she said. A tear fell from her eye and snowballed into uncontrollable sobbing. “If you ever feel how he felt, you better fucking tell me,” she said.

  I moved to the other side of the booth to put my arms around her. “I promise.”

  “Sorry for crying,” she said.

  “I have a song. It’s an old one I never played for you. I never brought it to The Factory because it’s a ballad—and we don’t do ballads. I kinda want to play it for you but it’s a little too cheesy.”

  Marlene sniffled and smiled. “A ballad for a guy? Is it Jesse?”

  “No, actually it’s about you. You’re so important to me. I couldn’t have gotten through any of this without you. Not through Jesse, Christopher, Patrick, Kenny, writing and recording these songs, or Silas’s death. I needed you around for all of it. I couldn’t have done any of it without you.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t have, silly,” she said, nudging me in the arm. “And you know I wouldn’t be anywhere without you either. We don’t need boyfriends, just each other.”

  “Exactly. All that energy wasted on guys. Screw it; they’re just delicious distractions.”

  “Icing on the cake.” We both waved jazz hands and talked melodically as we often did with inside jokes.

  “Whipped cream on my latte,” I sang.

  “Olives in my martini,” she sang.

  “A belt that matches my shoes.”

  “A dress that shows off my boobs.”

  We paused and laughed.

  “The cherry flavored condom,” we said simultaneously.

  I put my phone in its speakers and pressed play. “This is my song for you, in all its out-of-tune glory.”

  I’ll never forget the times you picked me up

  After every single breakup

  I’ll never forget the times you stuck with me

  After some stupid boy hurt me badly

  “I love it so much,” she
said. “I want this to be the first ballad I record.”

  Marlene performed “Bohemian Gold” at her next performance at a club called The Convent. Despite nailing every note perfectly, the song didn’t resonate with the audience like her other songs. Granted, it was new, so nobody in the audience could sing along. Still, after watching the tape later that night, Marlene and I decided it was a phenomenal performance, and posted it online.

  We had received no emails from our website alerting us to mass viewings of the video, so we did not check it for two days after posting it. When we looked, there were a few downloads here and there, but the people who had listened had posted saying how much they thought this was Marlene’s best song. A week later, it had gone as viral as her other songs. And then more. Marlene got calls from record companies and managers—real managers who knew what they were doing. By the end of the month, Marlene had found a manager she thought she could work with.

  The manager’s name was Naomi Rosenthal, and she agreed to fly out from LA to meet Marlene for a potential signing. Naomi offered to treat us to a posh restaurant downtown, but Marlene wanted to meet at Pancake Heaven. When Marlene and I arrived, Char was waiting on another booth. She offered us our usual greetings.

  “Girl!” said Char.

  “Girl!” said Marlene.

  “Girl!” I said.

  “Wait a sec, girl,” Char said, standing close to Marlene. “Why do you look nervous? Is it Robin?”

  “A music manager loved ‘Bohemian Gold’ and now wants to sign her,” I said.

  Char gasped. “We have a celebrity in the house!” she yelled.

  The surrounding patrons looked confused, but that didn’t stop Marlene from bowing to the crowd.